Dirty Secret.(Yokohama's International Stadium)(Brief Article)

It hardly seems like the ideal place to kick around a football. The field rests atop a toxic-waste dump. According to environmentalists, when the wind blows, dust tainted with PCBs--polychlorinated biphenyls, toxic byproducts of several industrial processes--billows skyward. Crabs that carry dioxin levels 20 times higher than international safety levels scurry along the banks of a fetid river that flows nearby. Yet not only is water from that same river used to irrigate the football field; this is also precisely where Japanese authorities have decided to build Yokohama's International Stadium--the massive, $500 million arena that will host the final match in the 2002 World Cup.

Built to celebrate the first World Cup ever staged in Asia, the Yokohama complex is also a revealing case study in Japan's environmental denial. Officials chose the site 10 kilometers outside the port city because of its convenient location along the main Tokyo- Osaka bullet-train line. In 1999, a year after the stadium opened to the public, PCBs and dioxins were discovered in the ground 500 meters from the building. But after a cursory environmental assessment, the Japanese Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport declared the area safe by Japanese standards. Independent environmental organizations claim that those standards are unusually generous and the testing itself is lax; they say the area continues to be heavily polluted with toxins and heavy metals, including zinc, lead and mercury. According to Teiichi Aoyama, director of the Tokyo-based Environmental Research Institute, what the country will be showcasing next summer is really "one of the most contaminated urban areas in Japan."

The toxic mess has been decades in the making. Yokohama, an industrial city 25 kilometers from Tokyo, began the century as a center for heavy industries like shipbuilding, iron and steel. In the 1960s local automobile and electronics factories helped fuel the Japanese economic miracle. Around the same time, the stadium site began to be used as a dumping ground for the city's industrial waste. Local residents can recall mountains of trash aflame and toxic fumes spreading across the area as recently as five years ago.

The incineration of waste releases dioxins--which are carcinogens--into the atmosphere. According to Aoyama, one of Japan's top environmental experts, one gram of dioxin could potentially cause cancer in as many as 10,000 people. PCBs are equally hazardous: both substances can impare the immune system, sexual function and learning ability, as well as cause cancer. Both can also stay in the environment for decades.

That is beginning to be recognized as a major problem for Japan, which has experienced some of the highest levels of industrial pollution in the developed world. The country, which has no room and little public appetite for vast landfills, burns more garbage than any other developed nation, even the United States, whose surface area is 25 times bigger. Japan also has the highest number of waste incinerators and the highest concentration of dioxins in the environment.

Yokohama officials, who are building a 70-hectare park around the stadium, claim that their tests show the levels of dioxins and PCBs at the site to be low and well within Japanese safety ...